The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler review – lost souls in postwar Vienna

The Guardian

20-02-2025

Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler is known for his restrained and sensitive novels that illuminate the struggles and joys of peripheral lives. His debut, A Whole Life, centres on a man who barely leaves his mountain home. The Tobacconist is a coming-of-age novel set against the rise of fascism in Vienna. The Field introduces a chorus of the dead who tell the story of their village.
Like The Field, The Café With No Name uses a narrow lens to tell the story of a whole community. At the centre is 31-year-old Robert Simon, an itinerant worker who assists the stall holders of the Karmelitermarkt in Vienna. In the late summer of 1966, Simon notices that the cafe on the corner of the market has closed. He decides to take on the lease in order 'to do something which would give his life a positive affirmation. To one day stand behind the bar of his own establishment.'
Simon's eponymous cafe has nothing in common with the grand and elegant cafes normally associated with Vienna. It is semi-derelict and unappealing and serves beer, lemonade, pickles, bread and dripping and occasionally hot punch. It is frequented by the stall holders of the market and by wrestlers, scallywags, 'drunks and crazies', all struggling to make a living in a city still suffering the effects of the second world war.
These lost souls become the subject of this slice-of-life novel. There is Mila, hired as a barmaid. There is the artist Mischa, who fights in the street with his lover Heide, giving everyone 'the sense of satisfaction that comes when others live out the passions denied to ourselves'. Harald Blaha, from the gasworks, rolls his glass eye across the bar. Mad Jascha cradles a dead pigeon tenderly in her hands and Simon briefly loves her.
In common with Seethaler's earlier work, this is a pensive novel, written with sensitivity and compassion. There is drama here – unrequited love, a stillbirth; a furnace blows up, a bridge is swept away. However, Seethaler's writing is always purposefully inconclusive and oblique. Threads of narrative are dropped and not picked up until several chapters later.
In general, the text moves fluidly from one character to another but occasional chapters are written as a vox pop. The reader overhears the general chatter of the cafe rendered without speech marks or attribution, the voices overlapping and echoing together in a confused chorus. These chapters provide a welcome contrast to Seethaler's elsewhere unadorned prose.
What exactly is Seethaler's intention here? The characters do develop and there are clear suggestions that the city is changing. TV becomes available on two channels and in colour. A subway is being built, newcomers arrive. However, the novel doesn't feel fully situated in the 1960s. The intention – in accordance with the no-name cafe – may be to illuminate the universal rather than document the particular.
The formless nature of this book will appeal to some, while others will long for dramas that are more fully explored. What one reader experiences as quietly powerful is received by another as slightly dull. Where does the line fall between austerity and flatness? Seethaler's novel is positioned on these perilous borders.
The viewpoint is perhaps too diffuse. Sometimes the novel is vague where it needs to be explicit, and vice versa. Less abstraction and more characterisation would be welcome. Often Seethaler's homespun philosophy absolutely hits the mark, as in 'hope is the sister of stupidity'. But truisms such as 'we don't know anything until afterwards' and 'perhaps you always remained the greatest mystery to yourself' are repeated too often.
Overall, however, these are minor quibbles. Seethaler's subtly understated voice remains warmly welcome in a literary culture that often displays its intentions too obviously. Many will love this calming, gentle and unsentimental story. Certainly, Seethaler remains admirably true to his creative vision. A poet of the small, the random and the event without consequence, his is a world we can all enjoy.
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire, is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.